Wake up, Buy Here, Pay Here people. It's a beautiful day. Go grab yourself another cup of Joe and say hello to Jim and Michelle Rhodes on the Buy Here, Pay Here morning show. Take it away, you two. Hi. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to another Monday. Yeah. It is Monday. And yeah, first Monday in the month of June. We're off to a new month. I know. It's hard to believe that it's already June. Conferences or the convention is only a few weeks away. We yesterday are, you know, because I know you guys love to all hear what it is that we did. Went on a hike. And so, you know, we consider ourselves marginally successful. active um but we do I mean we love outdoors and that kind of stuff so our neighbor who has uh he's got this website and it's all the hikes and everything all throughout the state I mean the guy's been everywhere and so he's like this is one you guys could go do and he's about 150 years old well he's I think he's 88, 88. Yeah. Yeah. I think so. Um, and so he's like, this one would be good. And it was called, um, the wind caves, wind caves, wind caves, um, which is up a Canyon up by gorgeous. Um, and he said, Oh, it's an easy one. Okay. It's considered a moderate hike, but it's two miles in and at elevation of a thousand feet. in the two miles. It was 980. I checked it, honey. I was thinking it was more than that, but you're right. It was like a thousand feet. We felt every foot. We really, really did, but it felt good. Both of us ended up taking a nice long bath yesterday to just ease our muscles. That's our goal, is to try to hike more during the summer and just get that stuff back. It was definitely nice to get out and breathe fresh air, sit by the stream and fish a little bit. I didn't catch a fish. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was really quite lovely. And there was this creek that you saw where the spring, I mean, it's like at the beginning, this is where it all comes up out of the earth. And so we grabbed a couple of cups. I took some video of that. Oh, it's just lovely. And the water was amazing. Oh, straight out of the earth. It was fantastic. Yeah, and it was interesting for me to see the river running pretty full. I mean, it was about as full as it's going to get. And it was pretty clear water. I mean, it was running pretty green. In my experience, like mountains in New Mexico and whatever, in the springtime more so when you've got the snow melt. Dirty, brown. Muddy, dirty, running, you know, when it's running full. Yeah. You know, bigger rapids or whatever. But this was running pretty full, but still, you know, pretty clear water. Yeah, I think most of the snow melt is done. Okay, so that was what we did. Right. Yeah. Good morning. I got a couple of quick updates. First of all, I got a shout out for, um, Anna Maria back, uh, Crystal and Maggie all provided videos for us for our V8 plus meeting tomorrow. Uh, so, you know, for our V8 people, that's, uh, tomorrow's our, our V8 plus, um, on CRMs. Yeah. And we were supposed to have a guest today. Um, uh, Timothy Evans, uh, And he sent me an email last night and just said, I got two managers out. And so it felt like that was not going to be a good time. So we're going to get that rescheduled for those of you who are looking forward to it. Yeah, maybe we will end up doing that. So that's why this is a different topic than what we were talking about all week long yesterday or all week long last week. Right. So we kind of were setting up this idea that we're going to talk about hiring today. So any who tuned in for that, just stay tuned. We'll let you know when that comes around. Yes. And for today, we want to talk about something that I find comes up with, especially working with new dealers. And I think this topic that we've got for today is really about that. So I really, the question was, what does it really cost us when, you know, we, we have slower sales? And, you know, I, I, When we work with newer dealers, there's a couple of reasons why we have this conversation. One is, especially if they're coming out of independent retail or franchise, that they get so dang stressed out if their sales drop off. Or if they don't start producing any sales right out of the gate. Yes. And then the other time that it's something that we talk about, and it does stress them until we have this kind of conversation with them, is if you're in the process of revamping or building or, you know, that whole kind of getting off the hamster wheel type of thing. And you're doing like just like a revamping in your sales team or, you know, having someone left and now you've got to rehire or whatever. And Jim actually asked me to be devil's advocate and so be the one that's like, no, why would I? But I'm just trying to set up a little bit of the stage for this is a question that we're asked frequently. And I think it's a good thing for us to talk about with dealers that are just out there listening is like, what does that really cost you? Yeah, and I think we saw some real glaring examples of some of the parts that we want to talk about here in COVID. If you think about what it looked like to be a dealer, remember that period of time whenever they shut down sales? Like there was a question of whether car dealerships were, what did they call that? What was the phrase? Essential businesses. Well, there was a minute that they didn't know that it was just like everything shut down. Let's figure out. And yeah. So let's just kind of use that example. What, what was the difference like for, imagine I'm a retail dealer only and I'm required to shut down for two months. What does that feel like? Now, if I'm a buy here, pay here dealer and I'm required to shut down for two months, what's the difference? So if you just think about it. They both might really hurt or make or feel like it's going to really hurt you. But there's a very different there's a very different light at the end of the tunnel. I guess pick any size of operation. If you're a dealership with one hundred and fifty or five hundred or a thousand accounts, you've still got those payments coming in. Customers are still paying. How many of you out there were talking about that during COVID when your doors were shut? It's like you were so cash full. I mean, just like all of your bank accounts. A lot of people paid down their debt pretty aggressively. Yeah, because you're not buying cars. There was a whole big adjustment. Auction houses were closed. It was a whole big thing. So that's kind of an exaggerated example of really what I'm trying to emphasize here today, which is, This idea that obviously, first of all, if we're an established buyer-payer operation, we enjoy cash flow from all those contracts we've done over the last two to three years, then that obviously helps us. So that COVID example is like, that's the case. But even when you're brand new, let's kind of break that down. I picked some really simple numbers to present here today, just to kind of round numbers to really... kind of illustrate the part that I'm talking about thinking about of course you you know me well enough we talk about enough on the podcast that um certainly our clients know that I'm I'm kind of the the tortoise approach to most things anyway long yeah you know let's be sustainable let's build something for the long haul let's not get so worked up if we're not doing business today or if this isn't working exactly right today like we're we're building we're fixing we're we're thinking long term here so this is why I think when I look at the numbers inside this illustration that I put together, it was meant to just kind of break it down in a real simple way and think about what is it, what is really the difference for us? Let's just kind of go through the math of a real simple scenario. And I picked three months because the way I often say it to a dealer, and I said it to a dealer not long ago, where I asked them the question, I'm going to ask you to contemplate what is the difference between, in their example, I think I was like versus selling 20 sales a month, every month, for three months. So 20, 20, 20 versus doing zero, zero. You do no sales here and you sell 60 in the month number three. Exaggerated example. Yeah. And I think that the thing to consider too is that we do cash flow modeling all the time. And so we'll start, you know, it's like 10 a month and then 15 a month and all of that. And so dealers will be like, I only sold five. It's like, it's okay. Cause you could sell, you know, that, that let's, let's get all of these, these, um, pieces, uh, in place, people trained properly, all of that. And then, you know, get your inventory all set and ready. And then, you know, that there's, there's a time when, when it, uh, everything just kind of clicks in. Yeah. It's interesting. I often find myself reassuring dealers when they're brand new, right? Just reassuring them that, you know, this thing's going to get traction. It's going to sometimes take a little time and there are different elements of the business that take a little more time than others. But I think the main, main thing here is just, if you think about just the math around sales and how it's different for us in buy here, pay here, lease here, pay here versus retail segment, um, then I just think it's important for dealers to think about this. And hopefully what we go through here today would provide them a little bit of maybe ā€“ relief a little bit of um you know some reassurance that it's it's quite okay in the buy here pay your business when we have some you'll have some peaks and valleys and when the valleys come I think what you and I tried to think about in the context of this conversation is what are the negatives like if I just went a period of time where I did less volume um What are the real negatives? You know, I feel nervous about it. But if you think about these contracts having a two-year, three-year term, three-year term is pretty common now. Mm-hmm. there's some question about whether the contracts ever actually make that long like most contracts are actually going to term out in more like 24 months okay so you're really talking about it let's just use that example a 24-month tail on most everything that we do any contracts that we originate so it's like what's the real difference we can show the math I can if you want to um I I've posted this already but good morning caesar Hey, Cesar Stark in West Texas. Way out in the west part of Texas. We talked about that the other day, what a big state Texas is. It's kind of like side squirrel. Sorry, everybody. You know, you live in Utah and you're at a conference and, oh, I know someone. Do you know so-and-so in Utah? It's like Texas is four times as big. Yeah, but it's always fun when people say, yeah, I do know him. Yeah. If it's in the industry, yeah, there's a good chance you will. Yeah, that's true. So the numbers that you've got on the screen here, this is just a really simple thing I threw together. It's kind of a way to break down a simple math comparison. I'm just going to do like three scenarios here. So for those who will be listening on audio, what I've got on the screen is... three months stacked, you know, side by side and I've got the volume set the same. And I just picked small round numbers here of a volume of 10 sales a month for three months. So, so selling 30 across a three month period. And I used a down payment of a thousand dollars just, and I know people average more than that, but we just, we like big round numbers. It's just easier for people that are listening, I think. So if you did a thousand dollars down, then, you know, that tells us what our down payments would be coming in to the bank account, right, for that period of time. And then That tells us the resulting contracts there on that next row. Obviously, we would have 30 contracts at the end of three months. With $30,000 that had come in for downs. Right. So you've got $30,000 in down payments have come in. Now, we've got to replace those cars. So in my math, to help on the formulas, I always do when I do this sort of cash flow modeling, I always treat it as though we replaced everything we sold on the last day of the month, as though we replaced it in the month that we sold it, just for simplicity of math. So obviously, if I have a replacement cost of $6,000 per unit sold, then I'm going to be spending in that scenario $60,000 each month to go to the auction, buy these cars, replace them. We can say that that includes recon in this scenario. And now I look at replacement net of down payment. Why? Because I think it's helpful to associate down payments with inventory. Why? Because we only get down payments when we sell, right? So we're only... you can associate it with replacing inventory. So if I treat the down payments as like an offset to replacing inventory, that's what that row eight is right there. It's the replacement cost net of down payment, which in this case, if I have $60,000, I'm taking the auction, but I got $10,000 from customer down payments to spend, so to speak, then I've got a net of $50,000 as a replacement net of down payment. So obviously that's $150,000 that I would spend replacing those cars net of down payment. Mm-hmm. And then I started to look at the payment side and I just said, okay, well, if I say that every customer that we financed has a payment of $500, then what kind of payment impact will I see across that three month period? Right. So, and I treat it like I get no payments in month number one or the month that I originate the contract to assume the month, the payment start a month later. So I have zero in the first month and I've got $5,000 in payments coming in in the second month and I've got $10,000 coming in in the third month. Okay. Okay. So that comes to a total of $15,000 across, you know, those three months. So you can see in that scenario, we're negative though, $135,000. Okay. So this super simple, you know, mathematics here, we're just looking at 10 sales a month for three months and, and cost, cost a car again of $6,500 per customer for payment. So I think the only critical things are replacing the car in the same month I sold it and then payments not starting until the next month. Okay. Okay. and so we're at the negative so the other scenarios I wanted to walk through was what does it look like if instead of selling 10 10 and 10 we sold five in month one five in month two and 20 in month three now you're seeing the screen you're about 12 000 more in the negative um Correct. Yeah. Yeah. So I've gone a little bit more negative on my cash during this period of time. Why? Because the payments were delayed. It still cost me the same. I still sold 30 cars. The inventory is still the same. It's the same. My down payments are still the same because I still sold 30 cars in three months. So again, we're looking at this thing across a three-month period. And these are exaggerated to try to illustrate the point. But I'm still spending the same amount to replace those cars. It's just that my payments are delayed because I had lower volume. I only bring in $2,500 in payments in month two and only $5,000 in month three. Mm-hmm. So I think it's, you know, and we can take it on one more level just to kind of give a further illustration. So just kind of giving everybody a chance to really kind of study that for a second. But if I did zero in month one and zero in month two, and I did the entire 30 in month three. Now that moves us to 20,000. Yeah. 20,000 difference or about, it's actually about 15 from where we started. So we were at one 35. So it was 12 and then 15. So 15 grand. So by selling 10 cars a month, instead of this scenario, zero, zero 30, then I, I'm $15,000 less negative than, I'm still negative cash, right? I'm out, you know, people can talk about profit. I got the same amount of profit across 30 days like that. In fact, I could argue in this scenario, if I'm reporting, you know, we can break down as much as monthly quarterly, like from an income tax standpoint, I had less income, right? If I'm just looking at my income tax, I didn't look at profit here. I just looked at, but clearly we can consider that profit. we don't have any profit to report and month zero or month one and month two in these scenarios. So I think the part that is important to really grasp and contemplate, because it's just, it's new, especially for those folks coming out of retail. They're just so focused on got up, got to make sales to make payroll, to build a bank accounts and all this stuff. And we're actually going negative here. So it's like when we go this, this shift means a difference in $15,000 less negative. So, yes. Right? Yes. I'm going to take it back to 10, 10, and 10. Less negative. Yeah. Okay. I mean, I'm going negative on cash because I'm replacing cars. I'm getting a down payment. I'm negative on every deal. I got a certain amount of cash and deal and risk in every contract. So when you start to think about that and think about, okay, so what is the real difference for me? And oh, by the way, yes, I didn't have as many payments in month one and month two. But if my contracts are 24, 36 months, that means I got... More payments on the back end. You're still going to get all of the money. It's just going to be, because it all kind of, you know, it all layers with each other. So it's just going to layer a little bit differently. So it's coming later. That part is true. But I think, what does that look like for our first couple of months when our volume is reduced? So how does this affect the sales team? Well, that's the part that, you know, when we thought through the negatives, then obviously if you got people sitting over there on commission and counting on commissions, then this is one of the things that comes to mind is that that's uncomfortable for them to go a couple of months with lower commissions. Yeah. Well, but, you know, as we were talking about this before the show, because I'm supposed to be like poking holes, but one of the things... It's hard for me to poke holes in it because with a lot of dealers that we work with, they're new. and um you know they that maybe they've been when we talk about the hamster wheel they've been on the hamster wheel for a really long time they are you know ready to start hiring a sales team um so you know this is something that could work really really well while you're bringing people on and getting them trained and all of that so it like it's so that you as the dealer you If you're now shifting into, I'm going to run the business, but I'm not selling cars and take that break from that flow of, I have to sell. How am I going to do it all? How am I going to do it all? How am I going to do it all? Because it's hard for a lot of dealers to make that shift into, now I got to train someone and I got to do this and I got to do this. Well, this kind of shows at least on the sales side that it's not as risky as As it, as some dealers have felt like I have to sell this or I'm just not going to be able to do X. And it's like, you know, you're, is that true? I mean, and, and so you can use part of that time to hire part of that time to train and then hit it hard. And maybe both of you guys are on the sales, the sales floor for that third month. And then you're backing off and because they're now hitting, you know, 10 sales a month. Yeah. Of course, when I first started, I wasn't, I was managing, so it wasn't my cash, but I can say that, you know, we, we ran our store myself and then the guy who, one other person, we ran it with two people probably to the first 150 counts or so. And so that was, you removed yourself from the stage. Oh yeah. Yeah. You change a new format. So yeah, I think the, the idea one was to sort of have a, know be able to obviously do it on a budget to grow to a certain place but it is challenging right to to do that and kind of as an aside on that and I don't want to forget to mention one other negative associated with this and it's not too bad to do to exaggerate it in a three-month scenario but your inventory would be aging a little bit. Like any inventory you had acquired early, you know, you'd be having a little bit of aging there, but it's all, it's all sold through in 30 or 90 days. That's another thing. If you're having problems in the shop, you know, this is another way of just kind of like, let's, let's get people in, let's get them trained so we can get that inventory back in line. So I, you know, it's, there's a lot of ways to, using this strategy can can it's it's going to cost some cash but it's it's something that can catch itself up in a pretty short amount of time and can give a dealer you know because we're all about how do we help dealers get off the hamster wheel how do we help dealers not feel as stressed about the things that are happening in the industry you know whatever and so this is just kind of showing you that there is a way to structure your volume So that you can get past those hiccups and you can get past like the growing stage or the hiring things or things like that. You know, and I think that's helpful. And maybe one more example to kind of this is, again, a little bit exaggerated because it wouldn't make sense for. many but there's some listening who could benefit from this kind of approach when I started managing keep in mind I had a retail background already I had owned I owned retail and sporting goods businesses before I ever stepped in the car business so when I was asked to manage that store back in 97 amongst the things I did keep in mind I was attached to a new car store so I had been working in the new car environment I stepped over to start managing and running this buy here pay your operation And so I reported back to the franchise store because our little used car department was sort of the part of the franchise store. Well, it used to make them super nervous that my volume, like in the third week of the month would be pretty low. And it's because I developed a strategy with a two-person team and also was around timing of marketing. So I had a certain marketing budget to work with, right? And I just chose, based on what we were seeing in terms of traffic, that I would run virtually all my ads in the first week of the month and the last week of the month. So you've got those two weeks, the end and the first of the month, where you've got your major business. And then the second and third week was... And the sales department was open the whole time. It's not that we weren't there to greet customers. But the focus for that two-week period of time was on inventory prep and making sure we were... And obviously, you could do some training or whatever else you use that slower time for. But we were very much... it was strategic in that we were, we were placing all of our ads very purposefully around the first of the month. So my experience was whether the customers were paying monthly or semi-monthly, many of them didn't make a decision to buy until the last week of the month to see, you know, I've done all my spending. I paid my electric bill. Is there money left over? And then obviously people get a check at the first of the month and people would buy. So that's true of your monthlies and your semi-monthlies. And some would argue that even bi-weekly that some would even argue that, um, you know, I'm still going to wait and see, make sure after my second biweekly check, do I have all this stuff covered? Well, it's cause usually with most people, rent is due the first of the month. And so it's like rent and those kinds of bills start. Well, yeah, I know when, when I've lived on a tighter budget that it's like, uh, when I, uh, the, different companies that I've worked for usually got paid twice a month. And so my rent and any bills that were required for me to pay at the beginning of the month came into that first check. And the second check was where the balance or the majority of my monthly bills and food and on all of those kinds of things just kind of came out of. So it makes sense that, you know, with, with how I used to budget, it makes sense that I would wait until the last week. And then this is what I got left over. And I know I've got another check coming in and in a certain amount of time. But the idea makes dealers a little bit nervous. I mean, they but you know, this is kind of a micro example of the same thing. You know, in that example, across a four week period of time, I was you know, we had slower sales in the second, third week, but we we did good volume in the first and fourth week. So that would kind of be the strategy. And we would we would hit our numbers. We would do our volume, you know, that was kind of the target. So that's, that's even breaking it down to the, by the week. And so it's like, can you afford to not sell anything for a few weeks during the month and then sell, you know, be able to, to pull, to, to get the inventory take out, you know? Yeah. Pick any time period. Like, why do we need to sell anything aside from the commissions and some of the things that we talked about? Like, why do we need to sell anything right now? If the tail on this contract is a 24, 36 month contract, like, then we're going to enjoy the income stream from that for a good long while. So it's like, so part of this too, for me, it's worth mentioning is that when we got a new dealer, right? We're working with somebody who's brand new. I will typically kind of give them a nudge on the, because sometimes they're uncomfortable making decisions about making deals and contracting customers. Cause it's, you know, it's high risk. They're used to looking at credit reports and they're scared of doing business with a customer. It's fun to listen to some of the conversations. It's like, but she has a, but she did a, it's, or she has a bankruptcy. It's like, and yeah. Yeah. So there's always that. So I'm often giving them a nudge to let's do business. Let's be a little more aggressive on the underwriting and let's go ahead and create. And we're probably going to make more mistakes in the first 50 contracts than the second 50, that whole thing. But I also think I'm walking that line between I don't want us to. I always say I want to be aggressive, not foolish when it comes to underwriting. So early, I want to be aggressive because we need to create sales. We need to create cash flow, which we see the illustration, the benefit of having those car payments coming in. But it's just also important to recognize we don't need to relax underwriting a whole lot. So if I'm thinking about an established dealer, sometimes the temptation would be to compromise underwriting and the interest of creating volume. And what I'm trying to illustrate here is maybe we need to look at a different strategy and not necessarily adjust underwriting, but find other ways to produce volume and maybe not get so worked up when we're at a time when volume has dipped. So I think for today, I thought about this just because we are seeing dealers coming off tax refund season. We're seeing in social media, a lot of dealers saying, Hey, our volume is off. Like we're not seeing. Yeah. It'll be interesting to see when we get all the data in through V8, what we're seeing through the dealers that we're working with through that. If, if that's happening everywhere. Yeah. And I'm going to start trying to bring that information to the morning show in terms of, at least as a percentage, like to be able to say May's volume was up or down by X percent over April. I'm not going to share exact numbers all the time, you know, with, with our V8 stuff, but I can say that we can certainly share in that way, you know, what people are seeing so that they can have some point of reference, you know, versus, you know, what, what Joe at the auction told them, you know, so it's like, We just got to, we got to try to have more information that we can. Are there, are there a lot of Joe's at auctions? Cause you know, Bob's Bob's Joe Bob. Yeah. No, I mean, I just, obviously I use that illustration a lot. It's like dealers. Sometimes that's their, that's where they're getting their education. Yeah. Cause they have to go to the auction. And so there that's for a lot of people, if they're not doing conferences and they're not doing a 20 group and they're not, that's the only place they go to talk to other dealers to get a a finger on the pulse I would warn or well warn yeah just caution caution thank you I was trying to find the right word I would caution dealers from um taking everything that they hear at the auctions as the gosh darn truth of all things. Cause dealers will fudge about there. Yeah. And yeah. And you'll, you'll see, uh, you know, stories I've heard. I've not, I've not had the opportunity to go to auctions. I hear a lot of stories about auctions. And, uh, so, you know, you'll have some that are, all full of advice and this is how I've done it and it just you know you get into their numbers and it's like they're a train wreck and or whatever so you just you just don't know unless you unless you know that they you understand their business model you understand their like you like the information you would get from a 20 group or um something like that You know, it seems to be that dealers fall into two categories on that. They're either transparent and they want to freely share with others what they do, including people that are in their own market. Like they're standing in the auction lane next to them buying, you know, do they trust that they're going to, are they going to be willing to share their own information about what's really happening in their business? Or are they going to fudge a little bit? Oh, business is great. You know, business is good. Like it just, they're either going to be, you know, transparent and forthright and give accurate information or they're going to just kind of, you know, ballpark and give, you know, an idea, but it's not the best source of information, as you said. No, it's not. So I think what you're going to look for for us, very specific information going forward about these kinds of things. But I think for today, it's just a way to just say, Hey, the math is the math. Like we don't, there's nothing to hide from here in terms of, and we're not, Obviously, we recognize the value of doing business. We want to see the inventory turning over, and we want to see the inventory stay fresh, and we want to see salespeople and everybody on the team energized because there's traffic and activity. Mathematically, I'm just simply saying when there's a bit of a dip, when we're in a valleyā€¦ it can work out just fine we just got to recognize that we you know especially when we're shifting out of retail we just we don't have to have sales today like we do in the um george uh out of florida love you george um and I i didn't wear my glasses so it's same is true for social media and I think like you know getting advice from the auction lanes it isn't gospel and often passed along from dealers who appear more experienced online And I think there's a lot of truth to that. And so, you know, as you're paying attention to social media and you're getting to know some of these dealers, you know, there are some dealers out there that are group experts or whatever that have, they are seasoned. And I still take it with some grain of salt because their business model may be completely different than yours. That's good. But it's a good idea to just kind of take all advice that you get with a grain of salt. Remember that the business model might be different. It might be someone that's just speaking bigger than they are, more experienced than they are. And I tend to find typically that more experienced dealers are just kind of like we're plugging along and they're not stressed when it dips. They don't like, oh my gosh, we haven't had any, where's all the people? That those are typically people not your super experienced dealers that are very vocal about what's your flow, what's your flow, what's your flow. It's typically ones that are newer or usually have lower volume or things like that. So be watching when you're looking at um, uh, looking for advice and, you know, how things and like a temperature check on, on different things. Cause it's interesting. I'll, I'll see, I see this happen quite frequently. Cause I'm the one that's trolling Facebook to see what's happening. Um, but that, you know, someone will say it's slow, it's slow, it's slow, it's slow. And you know, how bad is it there? And then, um, you know, some other people might be piping in and then you'll get, you know, your Jack Carter's in and he's like, it's the same as it always is in May or, you know, and it's just, it's just taking, um, you know, we, we can tend to get more worked up, um, because there's other people that are experiencing this, but it's just like, just breathe, tortoise approach, continue moving, keep, keep moving and, and know that, that a bad month is not the death, right? Yeah. And I think one, if I have an actionable for today, like we, you know, we want to share and I'll put it on the screen here, but I want to make sure that dealers think about the actionable. If you have a takeaway from today, I would say, you know, let's look at, Oh, I don't see my, my banner. So maybe it went away. Oh, I wish it wasn't far enough down there. So BHPH actionable. So when I think about actionable from today, from this topic, I would say when sales are falling off and we touched, touched on this a little bit last week, Yes, because the other thing I didn't say is in my little microcosm example where I was focused on selling for a couple of weeks. So inventory readiness in the other two weeks and collections and training. Because I think one of the things too, from an actionable standpoint here, when sales are off, I would challenge people to use the opportunity to go examine processes, like carefully examine processes. One of the things I look forward to doing in an upcoming episode, probably make it a series, is starting to examine what I'll call the deal flow and the whole structure of the deal. And so I think when we look at processes for people, and obviously people be all over the place in terms of their process, but I would say, When sales dip, we have to know, like as managers, owners, we need to know that it's not that our sales process has faltered, that we're shortcutting or that we're doing something different. So you're saying, I mean, that you need to have the processes in place so that you can know that it's not the process that's the problem. That's right. And we have to train on it and make sure people are, and we need to hold people accountable to that process. Why? Because if, if our marketing is still working, like there's different pieces that we're going to examine when our sales fall off. And if our marketing is still working and the leads are still there, but we're not closing as many, then there are things to look at. One's going to be sales process. Are we still following the same process? Are we still doing the same thing? We use the same phrasing, whatever. Is our inventory right? I mean, maybe there's a problem with our inventory, right? We're not presenting the right thing. That could be pricing. Maybe the cars are wonderful, but the pricing is wrong. It's not attracting the customer. The customer's not moving forward. So these are all things that I think when we, as far as an actionable for today, if sales are dipping and you're concerned about it, first thing in my book would be to go examine the processes. So that's going to be lead management. How are we handling the leads that are coming and just making sure that are we still the same? Are we still doing the same thing? You know, maybe we, maybe we're a small operation with one salesperson. Maybe the salesperson has got some stuff going on at home and they're kind of mentally checked out half the time. Well, it's something to know about our business. Like we just think because we could, we could make the mistake of going and fixing other stuff. And in fact, our problem is here. So I think, actionable for today is just make sure your processes are the same. Yeah. And, and use the downtime to train and, you know, the slower time, get to train, make sure we evaluate the inventory. I mean, now I'm giving you lots of action. Well, and, and the one that I'm, I'm thinking of from when you had your own dealership is, is, like, look at when you guys, when your spikes in the month happen. Because, you know, for, like, I'm an amateur data analyst. I'm an amateur data analyst. And I look more at trends. And so if you know, if you can look at when your sales, because a lot of people, I don't think that they look at it that way. Yeah. But if you look at your sales and you're seeing that there are specific weeks of the month, every month, historically over the last year, what weeks of the month do you have your most sales coming out? When do they buy? Or when do they buy? Yeah, because our CRM people would say that the time they first... they first come into the lead funnel to the time they buy can be a pretty long gap but but I think you're right to focus on when they actually buy when they actually buy and then um you know maybe just try doing something like you're shifting most of your marketing dollars for those weeks that people buy and it doesn't have to be a hundred percent yeah but I think you know if you use that strategy that I'm talking about in the first week and last week you could put you know, 75% of your budget over there or whatever makes sense. But I just think that by, by being targeted and being really purposeful in that intentional, then I think you, you'd have a chance to really identify, you know, some of those kinds of things. But like I say, if I had one takeaway for today, I'd say process, go look at your process, make sure it's still the same. And then you can move on to the other things. When you know the process is still the same, then you can move on to look at the other parts of your business. Agreed. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. Happy Monday. If there's anything that we can help you with, please don't hesitate to call or text 903-816-0216. And also, we still have room in V8 groups, and it's a great time to get involved. This is the right time. This is the right time to get involved this week. So feel free to reach out to us, 903-816-0216. And book your seats for Vegas if you haven't already. We hope to see everybody at NIA. It's going to be a great... conference and you know if y'all see us come and say hi we'd love to hear from you all right everybody thanks again so much for joining us
